So I'm resurrecting this long dead thread again, a friend at work wants help buying a laptop and I'm more a desktop guy.
Budget: $1000 max
Her only real requirements are a screen size in the 14-15" range and good battery life.
Nice to haves are a separate numpad on the keyboard, optical drive, a touch screen, and while not a deal breaker, she'd really like the ability to detach the screen from keyboard or turn/flip the screen around.
It'll just be your basic web surfing/office using/media playing general use laptop, but trying to future proof her a little bit with nothing drastically underpowered.
I'd like to try and get her a laptop with an SSD drive, there's the 24GB cache ones that are new to me that seem to provide some of the value and I'm guessing is probably all she'd need... ideally there's a larger SSD but I'm not sure the budget would allow that.
We went to memory express to just look around and see some floor models and this one seemed like a reasonable deal that would suit most of what she was looking for:
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX44435
But I'm not sure of brands anymore and I figure you guys might have some other suggestions.